After writing the previous blogpost on audience and reading a post by classmate Michael Yap on minimizing design risk, it suddenly hit me: From a design standpoint, I’ve been taking a rather risky approach to my thesis project. Here’s why I decided to take that approach, and what I am learning from it.

What happens when you get so psyched up about how awesome everything is going to be when it’s built that you jump right in? You get overwhelmed, that’s what. And in the end, the lesson is: you still have to start at the core.

“A design persona describes how to channel personality… and helps the web team to construct a unified and consistent result,” writes Aarron Walker in Designing for Emotion. After reading this short book, I decided this would be as good a time as any to create a design persona for my thesis.

A productive meeting with my new advisor David Womack prompts me to think about the tension between thinking and making. When is a good time to stop asking “Are you sure?” or “What if…” and to just start building the darn thing?

Last Friday, we had a plenary session with Paul Pangaro, who instructed us to look for the connection between design and intent. This requires clarifying what that intent is in the first place. After a bit of feedback from Paul, I’ve affirmed where my intent lies: in providing the best online cooking experience during cooking, instead of before or after.

During last week’s thesis workgroup, we were introduced to the idea of getting to know our audiences through character studies. A character study is not the same thing as a persona. Personas exist to help us envision an entire demographic at a time, and the end result is often a rather bland portrait of Pure Averageness. A character, on the other hand, is far more like a human being: idiosyncratic, unpredictable and contradictory…

After reading Maciej Ceglowski’s blogpost, “The Social Graph is Neither,” I was inspired to re-investigate what it means to do “social cooking.” Here are my realizations, and conclusions, with a few diagrams thrown in too. Yay!

After Friday night’s thesis prototyping, I had a chance to chat at length with one of the participants. Here is his feedback, on everything from the finer points of recipe-writing to game mechanics, interspersed with my reflections thereof.

Last Friday night, I ran yet another prototyping session, to test out for the first time the custom interface I hacked together. This was also the first time I did not participate in the actual cooking. In the end, I learned that I had to kill one of my darlings after all, but luckily I have some new directions to follow.

While writing my final thesis proposal this week, I found it helpful to draw a diagram situating my intervention in a broader context. This diagram explains how the simple intervention of convincing more people to cook could potentially lead to a positive change in the US food system.

… is that nothing ever goes according to plan. This weekend, I was hoping to build a basic video chat interface suited to group cooking. Turns out, the technology I was counting on didn’t work as well as I’d hoped…

I have created a research and development plan! The first person I showed this to (Frank) thought this was rather promising. The second person I showed this to (a developer at a startup) laughed and said to build in an extra 10 months, just in case. So… I guess we’ll see how this goes. But here it is!

Thoughts on defining an audience and the constraints it brings. If my audience is “home cooks and friends who have an internet connection and a webcam,” am I putting an unworkable constraint on users? On myself?

On Sunday evening at 8, I ran my first prototype. Six friends and I gathered on Google+ Hangouts to cook Roasted Butternut Squash and Apple Soup. The purpose of this prototype was to understand what the actual experience of cooking while video chatting would be like.

For my thesis, I would like to use commonly available technologies to increase dialogue around and awareness of the foods we eat. To accomplish this, I would like to build an online social cooking experience to help people cook more, and through this, engage more deeply with their food.

We grasp at unseen textures. We reach for the space around visible objects. We try to ascertain networks connected via imperceptible threads… All that the designer needs to do is find the right outline for the given conditions.Naoto Fukasawa,Without Thought

You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might someday lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So [...] write everything down.Steven Johnson,Where Good Ideas Come From